Peter Varlamov

Holy Hieromartyr Peter Varlamov was a priest of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God church in the village of Preobrazhenovka, Sterlitamak canton of the Bashkir ASSR, killed on 11 March 1930. He was numbered among the saints, the new martyrs and confessors of Russia of the twentieth century, for veneration throughout the Church by the Jubilee Council of Bishops in the year 2000. The record gives 21 May as the day of commemoration, but the sources do not show it.

He was born in 1897 in the village of Diyashevo, Belebey district, Ufa governorate, into a poor peasant family, that of Yakov and Elena Varlamov. His father died when Peter was nine, and his mother raised three sons and a daughter alone. He finished the village school and, in 1915, the courses for the training of psalm-⁠readers and deacons at the two-⁠class school in the village of Podlubovo. After the courses he was appointed psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in the village of Preobrazhenovka. At the courses he met his future wife, Anna Ivanovna Portnova (born 1895), the daughter of a blacksmith of Podlubovo. In 1915 they came to live at Preobrazhenovka, in the house for the clergy built by the village community.

In 1918, in the civil war, he hid villagers from death. In 1919 he was ordained priest for the Kazan church. In the early twenties the priest's house burned down, and the family, with five children, was left without shelter; the peasants then decided to give him an empty house belonging to the community.

To destroy the clergy, the authorities subjected them to enormous taxes and levies, on churches and on priests, who were responsible for paying both. Priests were classed as a non-⁠labouring element, and the sum of their taxation was set arbitrarily. In 1927 and 1928 Father Varlamov was required to pay a tax of 470 rubles; he had no money and was forced to give up a cow. In 1928 and 1929 he was asked for 1000 rubles.

In 1929 the persecution intensified and at Preobrazhenovka a meeting of communists, Komsomol members and the activists of the poor decided unanimously to close the church. Because Varlamov put obstacles in the way of the closing, he was arrested and imprisoned at Sterlitamak. On 9 March 1930 the GPU troika of the Bashkir ASSR decided on the supreme penalty with confiscation of property for the priest Peter Varlamov. The sentence was carried out at Ufa on 11 March 1930. The place of burial is probably the Sergievsky cemetery. Anna Ivanovna Varlamova died on 1 June 1980 and was buried in the Timashevsky cemetery of Ufa. On the basis of the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 16 January 1989, Peter Yakovlevich Varlamov and all those who were tried with him were rehabilitated by the prosecutor's office of the Bashkir ASSR (decisions of 22 August and 21 November 1989).